Talk:Myanmar
Going to be in Myanmar for July and most of August. If I don't get onto this site in that period, that's why. Don't think I've abruptly abandoned the wiki or been horribly killed or anything like that. Turtle Fan 14:44, 28 June 2009 (UTC) :Have a good and safe time. Business, pleasure, or education? TR 17:09, 28 June 2009 (UTC) ::I suppose you could call it a little of each. Teaching the most talented of the tribal minority kids English in the hopes that they'll be able to get the hell out of Dodge. The first step out of the reach of their useless tinpot dictatorship is school in the Philippines, but unfortunately Burmese early education is in such a sad state that most who get the chance end up failing out. So international schools exist to help them get up to speed so they'll have a snowball's chance in Manila, which isn't much better than a snowball's chance in hell. ::Anyway, it's a volunteer position, a labor of love. I've always wanted to do something selfless like that and I'm very interested in seeing corners of the world where things go on that can't be glimpsed within eyeshot of my childhood home. People think Korea was exotic, but the great powers of Asia, especially in the cities, are different from Western counterparts almost entirely in merely superficial ways. I fear Yangon will reflect a good deal of the globalized one-size-fits-all culture itself, but being a backwater, perhaps less so. Turtle Fan 17:20, 28 June 2009 (UTC) It's been in the news lately. Aung San Suu Kyi is finally out of prison. They think it's safe to turn her loose because the election is over. The junta's party won in a landslide, though of course not fairly. Also, most of the pro-democracy groups boycotted the election because they didn't want to legitimate the next government, so voter turnout was low, hovering around 20%. And last month they changed their flag from this knock-off of the KMT design to something that looks like it belongs in West Africa. I'll replace the flag one of these days, I guess. Turtle Fan 19:58, November 13, 2010 (UTC) :The outsized star looks pretty comical. For a supposedly Buddhist regime, they don't seem to realize that karma's gonna bite them in the rear if they continue repressing the people. Barrel Nagurski 02:48, November 14, 2010 (UTC) Rename? Every time it comes up in HT's writing it's called Burma. More importantly, the US State Department calls it Burma, the British Foreign Office calls it Burma, the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls it Burma, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade calls it Burma (there sure are a lot of different things an Anglophone country can name its foreign ministry, aren't there?) and most importantly of all, they call it Burma because the pro-democracy opposition groups insist on continuing to call it Burma. The country was renamed by the junta right after the 1990 sham election, so continuing to call it Burma became associated with rejecting the legitimacy of that government. The junta's rationale was that the name Burma is a holdover of British imperialism, and in sympathy with that I initially insisted on using the name Myanmar, but the fact is that imperial holdovers are not the enemy there. But the fact that every HT reference to Burma is also telling. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:42, August 11, 2012 (UTC) :Well, that HT calls it Burma reflects the fact that he's writing about the place in timelines with a POD before 1990. :As I recall, we renamed it at a time there was a noticeable tendency among American media to call it "Myanmar", but that's dropped off dramtically. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the name "Burma" is used more often by the Anglosphere than other countries or organizations. :I guess since the government, dubious though it may be, prefers Myanmar, I tend to "favor" that name. TR (talk) 21:19, August 14, 2012 (UTC) T2G Burma isn't labeled on the map. It is probably enough to have it in a lit comm for India.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 07:08, May 29, 2018 (UTC)